Snapping Shadows

On weekday mornings, we follow a ritual. I get out of bed first. I only ever respond to my own alarm, the same travel-sized triangular black and red casio with the big thumb-size snooze button that I bought in Wood Green in 1982. It bleeps, quiet at first, growing louder if ignored, finally emitting a long unbroken dream-piercing retro electronic call to greet the day.

I don robe, visit WC, then make tea. I take GGF's tea in to her where she still lies motionless, and I say "Tea." I leave her tea somewhere it cannot be easily spilt, and I take my own next door.



Sitting with that blank-eyed, am-I-really-awake stare, I use the tea-head trick of sipping the top millimetre from the steaming cup with a lot of air so it doesn't burn, making that I-know-it's-hot-but-I-need-tea slurp, a tiny gasp of delicious anticipation as hot tea meets arid night tongue. Sipping, cradling the cup, I stare out onto the day and take stock. I have at least five minutes before noises off announce the arrival of GGF. In a series of delicate moves, we dress, make provision for the day, and in around twenty five minutes, we are ready to leave.

Generally, I don't have to commute very far, if at all, but GGF has to get to Pimlico, and this means the Victoria Line. She gets to school early, usually an hour and a half before the children, and often leaves two hours after them. I walk with her to Highbury station. It's a seven minute journey, which we both enjoy. In the sun, in the rain, it gives me a peek at the world, we chat, we kiss goodbye at the station, and I walk back, often turning the seven minutes into fifteen.



On my way to the station, I walk due south into the sun. Seven in the morning, this time of year, on a fine day, I wear shades. On my way back, I see my shadow ahead of me, a moving diagonal, my body five metres long, my elongated pin head thrown upon walls and telephone boxes. I see the same faces, fresh awake, heading for the hole which will suck them down into their day jobs. I watch red-uniformed children straggling and bumbling along, trailing bags and ties, clotting like blood around bus stops.

Burials and bombs and demolitions and developments have all played their part in the re-making of this part of Islington. There is a glory in London's confusion, so that a stranger never knows whether a pleasant or unpleasant vista will greet them around the next corner. I often veer off the Holloway Road, take the pretty route. This small patch of London was formed by Parliamentary decree, some still handsome streets laid out around the Chapel of Rest which became St Mary Magdalene's in the 1850s. You can read about the the life people led here before the 20th century changed everything in Grossmith's comedy, Diary of a Nobody.

Snapping shadows as I walked back, feeling the chill of streets not yet sunny, walking back through the oldest part of this corner of civilisation, it came to me this morning that somehow, against all expections, after 21 years residency, I have finally arrived in the place where I live. I have been waiting to leave for over two decades, and instead, I find that I am in love, and staying. I don't know whether this represents self-acceptance or defeat. Perhaps these roots will provide a canopy.